• by Charlene Weisler , Op-Ed Contributor, December 10, 2009

This week I interview Dave Morgan, the CEO of Simulmedia. Simulmedia is a relatively new company embarking on an innovative way to measure and maximize TV promos. Using enhanced research techniques with data matching and psychographic profiling, Morgan's company can help companies better engage their target audiences. In addition, he also discusses set-top-box data, the internet and some recent research findings.

Links to the full interview videos can be found at http://weislermedia.blogspot.com/search?q=morgan Here is an excerpt from the interview:

Charlene Weisler: When did Simulmedia launch, and can you tell us a bit about what kind of work you do?

Dave Morgan: Sure. We are about a year old -- we launched in the fall of 2008 -- and our focus is to help drive viewership for television marketers, particularly the marketers for programs and networks. What we do is, we license anonymous aggregated set-top-box data from television operators.

Then we build models to determine how to better deliver the on-air program promotions that we are so used to -- but deliver them in a way that is actually more relevant to viewers and is likely to actually help better inform viewers of the programming that is available  -- and, ultimately to drive more viewership to the shows that they are most interested in. Anyone that watches television today knows that we all get the same promos for the same shows way too many times. That doesn't have to be the way it happens in the future.

CW: So could you go into a little more detail about how you decide which promos should be fed to which viewers?

DM: Sure. Some of it is pretty simple. Television for the last 30 or 40 years hasn't had to worry too much about really optimizing the way that it promotes shows. If you were a television marketer [with a large] audience already on your network, and if you did a good job informing people who already watched your network about the new shows coming on, then you could be pretty certain that you were going to have good ratings for your shows in the future.

But with the explosion of new channels and new choices, that's no longer the case. So we start actually looking at what kind of preferences [various] groups of people have for television shows, and we try to cluster them according[ly].

And one of the simplest ways is geography. In the United States today, virtually everybody -- no matter where you are in the country -- gets the same promos for the same national shows, the same time slot, the same day, the same program.

But our viewing interests are quite different. The movie theaters know that. In fact the movies that are available in one theater to the next from neighborhood to neighborhood are quite different.

 The video rental place knows that. Blockbusters from one block to the next block will highlight different films because of the diversity of interests that you can find by geography.

Yet today, the same program promo goes to Bangor Maine and the Upper West Side, Brooklyn, Malibu, as well as Waco, Texas. There are quite different interests [in all those places.]

And so we start trying to better understand what kinds of interests viewers have by geography, by time of day, by day of the week -- in some ways separating the person from the program and trying to understand a little bit more about what the person is interested in.

CW: So does that require that a network have several different versions of the same promo?

DM: No. In some cases it's just which show you promote. More and more networks have to promote their shows off their own channel. So we see a lot of out of home, bus stops, billboards, phone booths -- and more and more, the television networks are buying time on other networks to be able to promote their shows.

There are a lot of techniques that can be used to deliver better marketing, to promote different shows by geography or time of day or to find audiences in places that you wouldn't expect them -- maybe to recognize that the best way to reach audiences that are interested in a 10 p.m. prime-time health-themed drama is actually (at a different time). Maybe a lot of them are watching 'Saved by The Bell' at 7 a.m. on TBS. You wouldn't know that from any kind of rule of thumb in the industry today. You wouldn't know that from genre look-alikes. You wouldn't know that from demographics.

But if you look at set-top-box data, you can start discovering when different kind of audiences are [watching] television and what kinds of things they are interested in. And you don't have to know anything about the person. It's just being able to start building broad projectable rules based on that.

So we are able to do that -- we are able to come up with more optimized ways to deliver better marketing. And I hope and think that this will improve the experience significantly for the viewers themselves.